Here are the winners in reverse order:

• Volvo XC90 - Isn't this like screwing for virginity? Volvo means safety, not snout in the automotive trough.

• BMW X5 - It's a beemer. A bigger beemer than usual, but still the same driver mentality.

• Porsche Cayenne - Beelzebub has a devil put aside for thee! Why get your snout in the trough when you can get both trotters in too? Why are they always black? With dark-tinted windows. Is that you in there, Crowley?

Honourable mention:

• Volkswagen Touareg - Quasimodo on wheels

• Lexus - see BMW

• Hyundai Tucson/Santa Fe - butt-ugly Korean cars

Booby prize:

• Hummer 2 - 8 miles per gallon. One worthless driver.

Time for punitive taxes based on engine size, kerb weight, frequency caught blocking the roads on the school run...When they enter Hell, the drivers will be made to drive Smart cars. On a wire, around and around a pylon, like a control line aircraft model...

I've just borked my Firebird 0.7 profile again, this time by trying to install the DownloadWith extension.

I should know by now not to fiddle with this old version, but as it's capable of tunnelling through our content and application checking stuff, and I've been using it for a couple of years in all its tabbed meaty goodness, it's the only non-IE game in town. When I realised I didn't have the PDAConverter software on the machine, I tried to uninstall the DLWith, but on restarting I found that although the extensions were all working, they weren't visible in the menu, so I couldn't make any changes. Arrrgghhh!

OK, start FB with the Profile manager and create a new profile, no, not in C:\Docs and Settings blah, elsewhere... Now, do NOT start FB yet. Go to Explorer and look in your new profile. Rename all these files to bak of filename.

1. bookmarks.html
2. cert8.db
3. formhistory.dat
4. history.dat
5. key3.db
6. localstore.rdf
7. mimeTypes.rdf
8. prefs.js

Gosh, how I love oO for all this html faff. Copy the corresponding files from your old profile into the new one. Now start FB again with the new profile and check everything works, including your proxy server logon. If so, close FB, restart the profile manager and delete the old profile.

I wish I could figure what went wrong there in the old profile, but I've no idea where to look. Better still, I wish I could get FF1.0.1 running in it's place, but as long as FB works, I'll stick with it.

Entered using Firefox 1.0.1 in Mandrake 10.0. Yes!

If your wrokplace (no I'm not going to correct it) insists you use Infernal Exploiter and you want to use Firefox, what's a person to do? I've been using Firebird 0.7 but a new Bluecoat content checker update may rob me of that. It already makes me use the UserAgent Switcher extension to masquerade it as IE. Firefox won't work through the corporate firewall, but the old 'bird still does.

Fah, when we're all hacked it won't bother me because I'm no longer in the IT support firing line. But it irritates me to see perfectly good software (nay, great software) locked out of the corporate mindset.

And if I see another "FF sucks, I lurve IE" message I swear I'll have to clean the chunks off the screen.

I find the new Ubuntu http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ distribution an intriguing idea, in a moral sense. In the same vein Guadalinex http://www.guadalinex.org/modules/news/ and the Extremadura gnuLinEx http://www.linex.org/ projects are fascinating ideas. Hard to imagine Yorkshire Linux, eh?

Something is happening here. It seems that there are still people in the world who want to give something to their society. In the end, what do we leave in the world, to mark our passage? A bunch of Slashdot troll comments?

I'm no longer involved in IT support, yet I feel that my current work, while mildly interesting, isn't worth much. I would rather be involved in something constructive in the world. Unfortunately a family must be fed, and a mortgage must be paid, so when I see reports of the wealthy wasting their resources on fighting single issue politics I can't help but find this deplorable.

Por la libertad.

Unfortunately Bastille doesn't seem to be compatible with Mandrake 10. I've tried different command lines, but as the website says, Mandrake 8 is the highest version. Instead, I'm reading reams of stuff on security websites and applying as much as I can. If anyone has info on how to run Bastille with MDK10 then I'd like to hear it.

I have now removed 10CE from the desktop machine and replaced it with a fresh install of 10 Official from download disks. For any UK residents, I can recommend ChyGwyn/The Linux Emporium: they deliver quite quickly and do update CD's. Those of us still on dialup need this sort of thing to get a chance to keep up with the updates.

I switched because when I tried updating from CDs I lost the Mandrake Control Centre and found KDE had switched to a generic menu structure with no trace of Mandrake components. I suspect from the research I did that I might have been able to revive the menus, but I decided to just try again from scratch.

So far so good, not yet exposed to Internet until I get it locked down with Bastille and Firestarter and get Firefox and Thunderbird installed. Using these in Windows means I have got experience with them, along with Oo.

I've also removed Mandrake 9.1 from the laptop and replaced it with 10O. Remember not to try to get the ruddy ESS1869 sound chip going, or when you enable the sound server you bork KDE starting up! Thankfully the trick of using IceWM and starting Kcontrol from a terminal worked.

The one thing I need to get into now is MD5 hashing and verifying RPMs. I'm not sure I trust many of these RPM's that I download using Windows.

I've been struggling with this for some days and have finally succeeded. My experience may help you to get this working too. I got the Mandrake 10 Community Edition DVD from Linux Magazine Issue 34 a few weeks ago.

My system has an Abit BH6 Rev 1.1 BX motherboard with two IDE channels, plus an additional CMD PCI bus IDE card for two extra IDE channels. I had a Windows (95, 98 quadruple booter with Boot Magic) drive on the motherboard promary master, and I tried to install MDK on the drive attached to the primary master channel of the CMD card.

First problem: DVD Boot fails at the first screen to progress to the installer. Solution: create a bootable floppy with the installer on so it bypasses booting from the DVD. See the images folder on DVD for the means to do this.

Second problem: Installation proceeds OK but the disk partitioning stage requires choice of a different drive to the default. Chose the right drive by going for manual partioning and tried to reproduce the partitions that the auto choice made. Result: it worked but when the PC rebooted I just got LI -99 -99 etc. I went off in a sulk and started trawling through the websites for similar sufferers.

Now, the actual problem here is that MDK 10 must have LBA mode access to the hard disk, not "AUTO". The add-on PCI interface card relies on AUTO - there is no choice for you to make. So I swapped the Win98 drive with the MDK drive, so that the MDK drive is now into the motherboard IDE interface, with LBA mode access rather than Auto. A side effect of this is that it became HDA in Linux, rather than HDC. When I rebooted the machine I suddenly saw Lilo! It failed of course because of the changed drive designators, so I cleared the partitions with Partition Manager, and used a Win98 boot disk to clear the Master Boot Record with FDISK /MBR.

This time I used the bootable floppy and made sure that the target hard disk was set up correctly in the BIOS. I did the same installation as before, but this time I let the partitioning use the automatic settings in free space. On reboot, Ta da! Lilo boot loader with new screen, boots into MDK and starts up perfectly, apart from the microphone volume being so high that I nearly blew the place up with feedback. Now I can play with it!

Checklist:

1. It's easier to dual boot with physically separate hard drives for OS's, and use BIOS settings if necessary for selection.

2. Make sure that the Linux drive is using LBA mode and is set correctly for geometry. I did have to use Auto for Windows, but now Mandrake is installed I switched back to Auto and it still works.

3. Make sure that the BIOS is set for non-PnP OS, and that all PCI cards are set for BIOS-selected IRQ and address.

4. Unplug the mike before first boot...

I love you Adblock!

I guess that means I'm stealing content by not watching the adverts, but I'm sick of the flashy monkey-lookey-here nonsense.

Firebird sometimes seems to stop rendering pages when they contain Java. I spotted that some Java stuff expects to find the jvm.dll at

C:\Program Files\Java\\bin\hotspot

in addition to it's normal location of

C:\Program Files\Java\\bin\client .

Once I did this my daughter could see Nelly Nut's house! Yeah...

And it does authenticate through our firewall so IE? What IE?

I like Moz because of the tabbed dialogue boxes (why yes, that is how to spell dialogue). I'm not so keen on the Print Preview and Print facility - it seems not to work so well as IE.

Regretably there are some websites that just don't like Moz. But not many!

• Every few minutes it slows down to a crawl, then freezes and I have to shut it down and restart IE. IE5 didn't do this.
• It limits you to 2 simultaneous downloads unless you hack the registry
• It's MS but our firewall and proxy don't let us use Mozilla or Opera so there.